Month: June 2012

As usual, the post-ALA Annual Conference euphoria has given way to the general nastiness that typically permeates libraryland, at least in online social media circles. Case in point: This week’s latest scandal, ARCgate (complete with its own hashtag: #ARCgate), which goes something like this. Non-librarian, but book blogger, purchases an inexpensive exhibits only pass to the 2012 ALA Annual Convention, pounds the pavement of the exhibits floor, and walk away with hundreds of Advance Reading Copies (ARCs) of books to be published over the next year. Librarian, who paid full price for the conference and couldn’t spend all day on the exhibit floor because she was busy and had a real life, is upset that the non-librarian got all the good ARCs, leaving her with something less than she was hoping for. Librarian finds out about non-librarian’s exploits and score of delectable ARCs and is pissed. She fires of a blog post and causes the twitterstorm-du-jour in libraryland.

Because it’s hard to fit all of my thoughts into the 140 characters of twitter, I’d like to make a few points here:

ARCs are not the sole purview of librarians and are distributed widely and freely by publishers. The raison d’etre for ARCs is to generate press, word-of-mouth, buzz, and publicity for the forthcoming book. Therefore publishers distribute ARCs to librarians, bookstores, bloggers, reviewers, magazines, book club gurus, Oprah, college faculty, your mom, and anyone else who the publisher thinks will provide “good press” for the book and cause more people to buy it when it comes out. Librarians do not have the market cornered on ARCs, and although it’s sad that ARCgate Librarian didn’t get an ARC of the books she was looking for at the ALA Conference, this could be resolved by contacting the publisher directly. There really isn’t a scarcity of ARCs.

Publishers do not care that “non-librarians were scarfing up ARCs at the ALA Conference”. See my point above. ARCs are meant to be distributed. Publishers do not care who they distribute them to, as long as they think you will read it, and inform others about it. Publishers give out ARCs at ALA because they know a lot of influential folks in the industry will be there, librarians and non-librarians alike, and it’s a great place to get your product in front of as many bibliophile eyeballs as possible. Publishers do not think to themselves “we’re keeping these ARCs for librarians because they are who we intend to reach at this conference”. Instead, they give them out on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone in the exhibit hall, which alleviates the need to pack it all back up and ship it back to the home office. Visit the exhibits hall on the final day of ALA. Publishers will practically beg you to take the inventory they have off their hands.

ALA is not the American Librarian Association and represents more than just the interests of professional librarians. As the American LibraryAssociation, it supports the interests of librarians and non-librarians with an interest in libraries and librarianship alike. Library board members, paraprofessionals, library consultants, publishers, vendors, bibliophiles, and many others attend ALA conferences and are even members of the association. During the ARCgate twitterstorm many called for limitations on exhibit passes or participation in the Annual Conference on non-librarians, which is patently wrong, in my humble opinion. ALA is a “big tent” organization and limiting participation, in even a small way, by a group or groups of individuals would be a very bad idea indeed!

I’m glad that people are passionate about this profession. It gives me hope for libraries and librarianship. I just wish we could take some of this passion and corral it for issues that really make a difference, instead of trotting out our sour grapes every time something doesn’t go our way.

Over the past few months, I have created a new blog chronicling my thoughts and reflections as I discern my call to ordained ministry in the Episcopal Church. The byproduct of that blog, is a renewed interest to restart blogging about my other passion, library and information science here. This renewed interest comes just in time for the ALA Annual Conference starting this week in Anaheim, California, and it is shaping up to be a busy conference for me. Here’s a preview of what I’ll be attending at the conference: